I watched the Octant’s Round 6 with great interest. In fact I read all the forum posts about each project and processed them through "wisdom of crowds’ tech.
Wisdom of Crowd’s Tech has a number of criteria: Here are 4.
First, they have a diversity of opinion: “[E]ach person should have some private information, even if
it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.” [FN16]
Second, the members should be independent of one another–their opinions should not be determined by the opinions of those around them.
Third, the crowd’s decision making should be decentralized–each individual should be able to make use of the local knowledge available to her.
Finally, there must exist some good mechanism for aggregating the judgments of the members of the crowd into a collective decision.
Unfortunately Octant’s voting system does not meet all of these requirements. Particularly #2. The voting system allows users to see the voting results as they accumulate. This will have the effect of “herding” caused by the “who goes first” problem.
Another factor is the time required to read and process 42 different projects. This takes hours of time. If voters don’t do that, there is a good chance they are voting based on influence and popularity.
I would like to open a discussion about ways to improve Octant’s systems so they meet the Wisdom of Crowds criteria…otherwise what is being supported could be the madness of crowds which we don’t want.